Advanced Site Architecture And Product Feed SEO

Advanced Site Architecture And Product Feed SEO You did what with whose thing?

Who Am I?

Got on the Internet in 1986 at my school lab

Working online with search since 1996

Social Media, Paid & Natural Search with a smattering of Affiliates

in-house: e-Commerce, Publishing & High Tech

Moved to the largest European media agency & worked with Bayer, Readers Digest, NBC Universal, COI

Wrote chapters on SEO & Social Media analytics for B2B Marketing guides plus chapter on SEO for IAB

One of the SEO Chicks !

Ask The Audience

How many people in the audience are new to SEO?

The ‘Affiliate Penalty’

Creating an affiliate site for the sole purpose of listing products with no value added for visitors

Content not listed or given low rank

No amount of link building will fix it

Consistently low quality sites just got PPC accounts killed by Google

What currently works... Pay per click search ads Email from house lists Pop-ups, pop-unders Banner ads Contextual text ads Rich media ads Contextual targeting Affiliate marketing Behavioural targeting Search engine optimisation Emails to rented lists source: Marketing Sherpa & AdTech, January 2009 n.1,260 Poor ROI Good ROI

Your New Huge Site

Is it Unique?

Does it have unique content?

Is the content constantly being updated and refreshed?

Is it crawlable?

Is it properly targeted?

Is it on an old domain?

Is it segmented in a logical way?

YOUR NEW HUGE SITE – IS IT GOUNG TO RANK WELL?

Likely not

But don’t worry - Be Happy! You still have time to fix it 

Marketing Opportunity

Let your data do the talking!

Create keyword list

Export non-brand phrases from analytics and/or analyze site/content to extract relevant on-page keywords

Evaluate market demand

Feed KW into Google AdWords Keyword tool

Use ‘exact match’ matching to get more accurate view

Model opportunity using CTR

SEO & PPC ROI – PDQ!  source: Marketing Sherpa June 2008 n1,928 Good ROI Highly variable Very good ROI Organic Search (SEO) Paid Search (PPC) Difficult to gauge Poor ROI

Organic search dominates clicks source: Compete US Search Data June 2008 Which is why concentrating on Organic SEO produces the best ROI All categories: Percentage split of all clicks from Google % 5.7% 94.3%

Did I read that right?!? % 5.7% 94.3%

Vertical Selection

Generic doesn’t work anymore

Choose vertical, keyword research, choose domain

Competitor research

Be a big fish in a small pond, not a small fish in an overcrowded lake

Uniqueness

Don’t just slap product feeds up

Rewrite content

Reviews

Other UGC

Re-imagine categories

Add value

madlib

Uniqueness

Example

Supplier has 25 pendants called “celitc knot”

Differentiate

Research unique content

People buy stories

Think like a retailer – be a retailer

madlib

Auto-create landing pages

Especially good to target long tail

Use as much of database content on page as possible

Use copywriters to create differing versions of same sentence with each database field included

Vary copywritten text to fully vary text on page

Search behaviour is dynamic source: Internet sample 10 million people Hitwise March 2009 3.43% 2.49% 4.65% 8.68% 14.89% 21.92% 23.65% 20.29% Number of words used 22% 12% 8% 6% 2% 0% -5% -3% YOY percentage change

Identify Traffic Possibilities

The Long Tail of Search

Tons of keyword strings but few visitors

Do the math: thousands of keywords x few visitors = most of your traffic

Easier to rank

Based on product titles – ready to convert!

Keywords & Content

Semantic targeting

The merchant feed isn't always right…

Need more content than links

Target: Create a page of content a day

Blog on site, How To guides – video, Buyers Guides

Mine your internal site search for keywords

WRITE UNIQUE PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS

Relevant Landing Pages (not SEO)

Generated Landing Pages work for PPC or SEO

Make your landing page relevant to EVERY ad

Direct Visit or No KW detected Children’s Beds Search “Princess Bed” Princess Children’s Beds PPC Click w/param cmp=3&grp=2 Princess Children’s Beds

Relevant Landing Pages

Use PHP code to:

Parse referrer token for keywords (PPC & Natural Search)

Parse request token for parameters set in PPC URL (PPC)

Display alternate content based on incoming keywords/ params.

Param ?src=ggl&cmp=1&grp=2 selects “Princess” content

Session cookies for consistent tracking

Convert (or DIE)

Analytics rule!

Keyword referrals from the search engines

Find multiple-word phrases on homepage or highest traffic page and sort by volume

Is this visitor landing on the best page in terms of relevance, consistency and opportunity?

Convert More

Run a simple a/b test to:

Segment visitors by keywords

Redirect visitors to a better ‘engagement’ page

Test response rates

Talk to suppliers about their own landing pages if you convert then they don’t

Think like a retailer – you are selling as much as supplier is

Domains

Age important factor

Hosting also important

Radically different content does not work (new content, old domain)

Trust

Site Architecture

Bricks and mortar of your shop

Can help increase relevancy

Help humans understand your site

Create non-dynamic, static, content rich pages

Code in an SEO-friendly way

Can help you rank better

Site Architecture

Site strategy must be holistic

What is the path my visitor would like to take?

What groups logically together?

Be your own customer

Utilize your tools & data collection to help identify key areas

Understand source of traffic (SEO, PPC, Other)

Some Top Criteria

Sitemaps

URLs

Internal linking

Content

Internal linking

Backlink acquisition

Internal linking

Sitemaps

What is a sitemap?

From sitemap.org: “Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.”

Human sitemaps vs XML sitemaps

Inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling

Provides page importance, update date

Crawlable Architecture

Establish the bedrock of your website & become more “Crawlable” and “Search Engine friendly”

HMTL Standards

Follow W3 standards (HTML, XML, CSS) & validate.

Try to be browser agnostic

Consider semantic standards such as Microformats and RDF

Discovery Architecture

Improve Crawler discovery by leveraging what the search engines all read

Robot.txt/meta tag exclusion (http://www.robotstxt.org/)

Use robots only if required and fully understood

Allow most frequented/important areas of the site

Protects private/restricted access, or duplicates etc

Disallows non essential areas of your site

Crawlable Architecture

“ Crawlable” and “Search Engine friendly” Content

Static HTML for key content, structure, and navigation

Meaningful page titles

Simple clear and descriptive Anchor text

Good internal linking that is balanced

“ Not too deep or Not too wide”

Don’t link to spam!

URLs – the Good, the Bad & the UGLY http://www.yummytastychocolate.com/sessionID/SLK/imgsrc/NMA10666/cat_id/SOMETHINGSTICKY/pid/HUFESBJ6U62HE3D3QOUDB99EUICR0ITSNOT42/product-Chocolate-Cream--Coffee-Liquor-YUM05.htm

Make Just One Search Engine Happy

Short-ish length

Logical divisions

Remove 'session ids’ - Simple URLs with no query parameters.

URLs should be easily readable and describe your content

Avoid excessive redirection chains, keep them short, fix if long

Don’t keep changing content or changing page names

Stop duplicate content with canonicalization

Don’t always use same anchor text but keep semantically related

404 Pages Bad: HTTP/1.0 200 Ok (soft 404) Good: HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found Google sez: “...soft 404s are confusing for users, and furthermore search engines may spend much of their time crawling and indexing non-existent, often duplicative URLs on your site. This can negatively impact your site's crawl coverage—because of the time Googlebot spends on non-existent pages, your unique URLs may not be discovered as quickly or visited as frequently.”

Link Building

Directory submissions

External blogs

Mini sites

Social media (Facebook/Twitter/etc)

Online PR

Buy links (but don’t get caught)

Internal Linking Issues

Don’t bury your directories

http://www.yummytastychocolate.com/page/choc/allchoc/morechocolate/lovelychocolate/fillings/coffee/Truffles

Have great URL conventions

Descriptive internal links

Beware of Spider Traps like calendars

Follow or NoFollow… That is the question

KEYWORDS IN ANCHOR TEXT

Social Graph Metrics

Who is linking

How often are links created

Where are links coming from

Frequency of link build from social sources

Spikes

Authoritative mentions

Content or Profile Links

There are many places where you can create public profiles or content pages for free.

Often they have good authority metrics

Some offer ‘Follow’ links

The key is to create value-adding content & build links to those pages  honest

SEO + Level of Competition Success is based on links as votes. High quality links come from being buzz-worthy. Buzz SEO is not easy, nor are there shortcuts.

Monitoring